Thursday, June 3, 2010

A little Urdu Scholarship

Continuing to practice Urdu -- after making major progress late last week in basic reading. Still struggle when I open BBC Urdu pages, however. I also took a peek at a Premchand story (Kafan; The Shroud) posted by Fran Pritchett, and struggled there too. One of the biggest limitations is of course vocabulary.

The Turkish word urdu, as a military encampment, appears in Indo-Muslim texts from the middle of the twelfth century. Babar in thesixteenth century refers to his own urdΣ-e mu‘all≥, the exalted camp. Butthe word is not explicitly associated with language until the middle of theeighteenth century. It was then that Arzu, Mir and others began to usephrases like zubaan-e urdu-e sh≥hμ,2 zubaan-e urdu-e mu‘allaa, or, moremodestly, mu√≥vara-e urdu-e mu‘allaa—the idiom of the exalted camp. Andonly at the end of the century do scholars begin to find scatteredreferences to the word urdΣ alone as a metonym for a language, which isstill more usually called Hindi. The idea that one could name a language“military camp” had a built-in ambiguity, which comes out in thefloundering attempts of the early British grammarians to locate thelanguage and decide what it was and what it could be used for. Was it alingua franca, a “jargon” associated with the large, dispersed militarybands that so pervaded the Indian scene, a language of bazaars? Or was it,as Gilchrist argued, the real spoken language of respectable people, in theBritish sense, and an admirable literature?

But this name ‘Urdu’ became in later years an allusion to past time,and an interpretation of it—specifically to Mughal India. From the Parsitheater, the plays of Agha Hashr Kashmiri, the films of Sohrab Modi andothers, most notably K.K. Asif’s Mughal-e a‘zam (Mughal e Azam), what counts as Urdu for many people is bound up with images of Akbar, Jahangir, Nur Jahan andAnarkali. My own interest, as an historian of more recent times, is inthese processes of cultural construction in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies. In this paper, however, I will offer a brief speculation about thenature of language and society in relation to the cultural authority of theMughal regime.

Most immediately, this paper is a response to Amrit Rai’s book, AHouse Divided: The Origins and Development of Hindi-Urdu, firstpublished in 1984 and recently reissued in paperback.

Much of the rest of Lelyveld's essay is untangling some of the mess from Amrit Rai's 1984 book, A House Divided.

* * *

Alok Rai, in Annual of Urdu Studies

It might be interesting, at this point, to look at the evolution of thename Hindustani. The colonial origins of the name are well-known. Itseemed entirely logical for the colonizers to assume that the people of theplace that they had conquered—Hindustan—should have a language thatcould be called Hindustani. Apparently, the name “Hindustani” was notunknown even before the advent of the British—although, obviously,only outsiders could feel the need to name the unknown language(s) ofthe strangers whom they encountered in the land of Hind. Thus, there aresundry occurrences in sixteenth and seventeenth century Persian texts(Faruqi 2001, 30). But the name of Hindustani never caught on among thelocals, as it were. Indeed, Gilchrist, writing in the late eighteenth century,went on to say that he would use the name Hindustani, in preference toall other names “of the popular speech of the country … whether the peoplehere constantly do so or not” (in ibid., 32; emphasis added). The interestingquestion here concerns the limits of colonial knowledge, and alsothe limits of the effectiveness of colonial knowledge—and, indeed, colonialignorance (see Lelyveld 1994). Thus, the ascription of a unity, albeitfalse—and a misnomer—on the intercommunicating languages and dialectsof the people, particularly as this translated into administrativepractice and publishing activity, could hardly be without effect. Thus, thecolonial authorization of the name of “Hindustani” was bound to besomething akin to a self-fulfilling prophecy, with an ambiguous impact onthe fact or real existence of Hindustani, as a language-system that enabledat least contigual communication even in precolonial times, particularly inalliance with modern communication technologies. Gilchrist cites the famousOrientalist H. T. Colebrooke on the existence of an"elegant language which is used in every part of Hindoostan and thedukhin, which is the common vehicle of intercourse among all well-educatednatives and among the illiterate also, in many provinces of India; andwhich is almost everywhere intelligible to some among the inhabitants ofevery village…."(Rai 2000, 13)

This language, which could be called Urdu and Hindi, can only be Hindustani,capacious and tolerant as it spans the range from the speech of“well-educated natives” down to the demotic dialects of diverse peoples.The name of Hindustani, however, remained confined to colonialusage, in the main. Until we come to the latter half of the nineteenthcentury, that is. Once it became crucial for the emergent Hindi-Hindusavarna proto-élite, in the period after 1857, to make space for themselvesin the colonial administration1 the shared and overlapping linguistic spacehad to be divided and split up. Then, the name “Hindustani” could meaneither that overlapping part of the continuum which was common to bothHindi and Urdu—which was no fun at all if one was thinking of makingspace for oneself in the zero-sum game of the colonial administration; or“Hindustani” could mean that part of the continuum which was neitherHindi nor Urdu—in which case it disappeared altogether, as it did for Mr.Ghanshyam Gupta. As the politics of dissension gathered steam, and—mixing metaphors madly—snowballed and ramified, “Hindustani” cameto denominate the terminological compromise which was advocated byGandhi, among others. However, compromise was the last thing anybodyhad on their minds at that time, and “Hindustani” left both of the combatantsdissatisfied and suspicious: each saw the name as a Trojan horse forthe other side—even as it sought, with manifest contradiction, both todistance itself from, and to claim, also for its democratic legitimacy, thecommon terrain! In this kind of force-field, Gandhi’s compromise formulation“Hindi or Hindustani” was doomed to failure. That “or” could connoteeither alterity or identity. It could mean either that Hindi was thesame as Hindustani, so the mullah was up in arms, or that Hindustani wasan alternative to Hindi, so the pandit, quite as pugnacious, would havenone of it.

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